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Stage 2019/13 [A075] | ||
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Silverfox Roadhouse - Delta Junction (Alaska Highway) |
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| 19mi / 30 km | |||
| 60 Hm (garmin edge 1000) | |||
Cycling Whitehorse, Yukon to Anchorage, Alaska via Dawson City.Stage from Solverfox Roadhouse to Dawson City following the Alaska Highway to its northern end. |
 Today is a very special day. First thing is kind of jubilee: we start stage number 75! There are 74 stages behind us, all the way between here and San Francisco. These 74 stages were full of great experience and even greater memories: glaciers, bears, sequoias, coastal roads. Heat, cold, rain and wind. And whereever we cycled we encountered great people. Looking back, there hasn't been a single bad experience that stuck my mind. And the second speciality of this stage is the destination: In Delta Junction we will reach the northern end of the Alaska Highway. But even if today's 75th stage is quite a short one, the weather conditions make it hard to get started. |
 Todays destination Delta Junction is the northern end point or starting point of the Alaska Highway. Since the official counting of miles is from the south upwards, Delta Junction with mile 1422 is considered to be the end of the highway by the locals. Strange but true: beeing at mile 1422 does not mean that the southern end of the highway is 1422 miles away: After the war, some parts of the route were relocated, other parts of the Alaska Highway were straightened. The original old miles are still in use today and this tradition is taken particularly seriously in Alaska: at the roadside there are stones at a distance of one mile (1.6km) on which the original miles are indicated, even if this value has nothing to do with the driving distance. At the northern end of the Alaska Highway there is a monument. This is also pretty much the point at which the Alaska Highway was connected to the existing road network of Alaska. It took us 75 stages of cycling to get here and take this photo. |
 Next photo stop at the board, on which the basic data of the construction of the Alaska Highway are compiled. Also this sign states that the highway is 1422 miles long. But as I mentioned above: If you drive down from here to the south end, you will arrive at your destination after only 1370 miles. |
 After the highway is before the highway: Leaving the Alaska Highway, we enter Richardson Highway, which will take us a little way south to the junction with Denali Highway. But we won't deal with that until tomorrow, the rest of the day we stay in Delta Junction to celebrate our 75th stage over a dinner with freshly tapped beer. And we need to buy supplies for the next few days. In Alaska, too, the distances are long, the catering options are limited and food supplies must be planned with foresight. When visiting the supermarket, it is noticeable that there is a lot of Russian food to buy here, often imported directly from Russia with the original packages using Cyrillic letters. Interestingly, around 20% of Delta Junction's 1,000 or so residents are from Russia or Ukraine. This is not because these people were bought in 1867 when the US bought Alaska from Russia. The people came to the country as immigrants only after 1990 and settled in Delta Junction. |